Abstract

Characterising complex quantum systems is a vital task in quantum information science. Quantum tomography, the standard tool used for this purpose, uses a well-designed measurement record to reconstruct quantum states and processes. It is, however, notoriously inefficient. Recently, the classical signal reconstruction technique known as ‘compressed sensing’has been ported to quantum information science to overcome this challenge: accurate tomography can be achieved with substantially fewer measurement settings, thereby greatly enhancing the efficiency of quantum tomography. Here we show that compressed sensing tomography of quantum systems is essentially guaranteed by a special property of quantum mechanics itself—that the mathematical objects that describe the system in quantum mechanics are matrices with non-negative eigenvalues. This result has an impact on the way quantum …

Date

December 8, 2015

Authors

Amir Kalev, Robert L Kosut, Ivan H Deutsch

Journal

npj Quantum Information

Volume

1

Issue

1

Pages

1-6

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group